Do you expect that CA will bring a civil suit against Wang, as recommended by your board of directors' Special Litigation Committee?

We have not made any determination about that. The SLC gives a recommendation to the court as to how these cases should be disposed. Once the SLC's report is accepted [by the court], then the company needs to decide what it does next.

In your view, what needs to happen for justice to be done?

I don't know. And I say that very honestly. I do not know what should happen next. I think we've got to let the court [process] play out. On one hand, there's sort of this natural inclination for revenge. On the other hand, the company needs to put this stuff behind it and move on. I cannot tell you where the board will come out on this. This is clearly not a decision I will make by myself. It's a decision the board will make with due consideration of all the facts after the SLC report has been accepted.

The SLC concluded that Wang created a "culture of fear" at CA. Do you see any vestiges of that left at all?

No. The ghost of Sanjay is in the halls, but there's not much of Charles left at CA. Charles has been gone a long time. The company has gone through an enormous amount of turmoil. There are a lot of new people. By my estimation, only about 30 percent of the company was there when Charles was there. So there are more new people in the company than old; there are many more people who don't know Charles than do. And Charles didn't leave a big legacy of stuff around. He had been disengaging from the company, as I understand it, for quite a while before he actually left in 2002. So Charles' really active days in the company were a long time ago.

In 2005, I wrote an editorial in response to a full-page ad you had taken out in Computerworld and other publications that was written in the form of an open letter to your users to explain your new vision for CA. The vision centered around what you called Enterprise IT Management, or EITM. My response was an open letter to you, in which I said this: "That's not a vision, John. That's what your users do. All the time. It's their job description. Referring to it by the goofy EITM acronym doesn't elevate what they do to a vision. It reduces it to marketing blather." In retrospect, do you think I had a valid point at all, or was I completely off-base? You were completely off-base.

Your point is well-taken. It is a very simplistic message. Some might say, too simplistic. A lot of people said WebSphere was too simplistic, too. It is astonishing to me how in this industry, we don't do the simple things well and to completion. We do lots of hard things partially. So the fact remains that no one to date had actually put forward a way to take the end-to-end panoply of stuff that people do in IT, and figure out how to connect it, how to manage it, how to secure it, or any of that stuff. So to say EITM is people's job description is true. But they're not doing it. And they're struggling to do it with chewing gum and baling wire, and there was no vendor who was standing up and saying, "OK, I'll take that on. I'll figure out how to make mainframes talk to PCs, and manage them together, and figure out how to make Microsoft [Systems Management Server] stuff talk with IBM [Resource Measurement Facility] stuff, and at the end of the day give you a consistent view of what's going on." No one did that.

In that same editorial, I faulted you for your decision to eliminate all 300 of your customer advocate positions worldwide, and I quoted one of your users who told us that for him, that was a "black mark" against CA. In hindsight, do you still believe that was a good decision?

I do. That was one of my best decisions, and here's the reason why. What was happening was that 300 people were ending up being the customer voice. And 5,230 [sales] people were abdicating their responsibility. In other words, the sales force felt that because there were these 300 people out there doing this stuff, they didn't need to worry about customers. And I said, 'I'm going to take that crutch away.' A sales force cannot not be worried about its customers, and their customers' success and customer satisfaction. And the fact that these people were out there, supposedly as the proxies for that, is a crutch that [I didn't want them] to have. Then those people ended up having other jobs and they didn't go away, but I took them away and said, 'Now, every salesman's first responsibility is customer success.' And it worked.